Open source Business Intelligence: an alternative to proprietary tools

Organisations are looking to increase revenue and improve profitability by improving efficiency and effectiveness in their business processes. Business Intelligence (BI) tools form the major components that supports and enables such competitive differentiation. Open Source BI has matured to the point where organisations can evaluate to see whether it meets basic requirements, providing a low-cost solution. Recently, Open Source BI has also been gaining attention, as users of proprietary BI applications face increasing licensing costs. This paper explores open source approach to BI, evaluating and comparing three of the most used open source BI tools: OpenI, Pentaho and SpagoBI.